Most of the world’s 6.8 billion mobile subscribers live in the developing world, and they use their phones primarily for voice calls. As researchers and practitioners seek to enable this population to access, report, and share information using the phone, the ICT4D community has witnessed a surge of interest in Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems.

The session will explore the role of IVR systems to collect data from, provide information to and create knowledge communities for marginalized communities. Panelists and the audience will discuss specific ICTD application areas for IVR platforms, success and failure stories of deployments in the developing world, lessons learnt and future challenges.

Panelists

We have leaders from four major IVR platforms and an experienced IVR user who all will share their experience in using IVR systems in the ICTD domain. Panel will be moderated by Ed Cutrell from Microsoft Research India.

Organizers

Notes

In addition to checking out all the above platforms, we would also encourage people reading this page to check out EngageSpark and contact David Hutchful if they are interested in exploring their platform.